


sleepless long nights (that is what my youth was for)

by krakens



Series: operatives and enforcers [1]
Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-09-19
Packaged: 2018-04-21 12:17:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4828859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krakens/pseuds/krakens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gaby remembers the war in bits and pieces: her mother’s sad and pale face, her father coming home much too late one night and complaining that stress from work was making him lose his hair over breakfast the next morning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sleepless long nights (that is what my youth was for)

Gaby doesn’t remember much of the war. She was only seven when it ended, and honestly things hadn’t been that bad in the Teller home – there was always enough food, enough money. The only thing she remembers from the early years of her life is her parents. She remembers her mother’s sad, pale face. She remembers her father coming home much too late one night and complaining that stress from work was making him lose his hair over breakfast the next morning.

She remembers that when her mother fell ill, Uncle Rudi had brought an awful Nazi doctor (a reedy man with little black eyes and grey-yellow teeth) into their home to treat her. She remembers the fit her uncle had thrown when her mother finally slipped away. She remembers, like a camera’s flashbulb, the moment he had blamed her father for her mother’s death, because it had seemed nonsensical even to a grieving child.

She remembers, more than anything else, the bombs.

Her father was gone by then; he’d sat her down on his knee one evening and promised her he’d be back soon, and then vanished into the night. Her uncle hadn’t come for her, either. She’d been alone, wedged under the bed in her childhood room as the sky fell on Berlin.

In the end it was her father’s friend Herr Kirsch who had fished her out of her hiding spot, days after the siege began. He’d promised her father he’d take care of her, she learned later on in her life, and he kept her safe until the War ended. But things got worse after the end – worse than she’d ever remembered them being before.

She remembers hating the Allied soldiers, with their shiny brass buttons and glinting rifles, always milling around like vultures as people starved in the streets. She would’ve starved too, but Herr Kirsch had told her that she could earn her keep in the auto shop like he did, since she had a brilliant mechanical mind.

And here’s the thing she remembers most clearly about her childhood, still crisp and clear as a photograph after all these years:

“Just like my father,” she’d said, and he’d slapped her full across the face, so hard that her vision had been punctured with a thousand little pinpricks of light.

“You don’t have a father,” he’d told her sternly, slowly, clearly. “Your name is Schmidt and you’ve been an orphan as long as you can remember.” She’d nodded through her sniffling and tears – he could have told her anything about herself and she would have agreed with him.

Back then she’d been confused but obliging, just desperate for some kind of safety, maybe even a home, so even though she hadn’t understood she’d obeyed. She knows now that he was protecting her from her own bloodright; the scion of a well-stationed family of Nazis would not have made it to the age she has. There was some measure of chance involved in her survival, anyway. Herr Kirsch had taken in a half dozen war orphans and had enough children of his own, but most of her foster-siblings had died of starvation, illness, or plain simple cruelty not long after the war ended.

Supposedly, surviving makes her one of the lucky ones.

* * *

Dancing might be the only thing she really loves.

It’s hard, hard work. It’s long days made longer when she comes home to daily chores at the auto shop. She doesn’t have friends – the other dancers turned up their nose at her the first time she showed up before changing out of her oil-streaked overalls. And the boys at the auto shop – well.

“I don’t _think_ of you as a ballerina,” one of them says one day while they’re working on the same car.

“Why not?” she asks.

“You’re already pretty, and a mechanic,” the boy says.

“And she’s so well-read,” her foster-brother Friedrich comments from across the shop. “How does she find the time?” he muses in a teasing way. The remark goes ignored by the boy.

“I can’t imagine one girl could be all that,” he says.

He probably means to compliment her, but she knocks a bucket off the boot of the car and it hits him on the head. _Ill-tempered_ enters the growing suite of words the auto shop boys use to describe her.

She doesn’t mind. She doesn’t care what they think of her, as long as they know that she’s a ballerina – and a good one at that.

Then, one morning:

Herr Kirsch grabs her by the shoulder as she’s heading out the apartment door. She’s already running late, so her mood is preemptively sour.

“What?” she asks him.

“Not today,” he says.

“Excuse me?”

“We need you at the shop,” Kirsch says. “And I’ve decided that I don’t like you traveling alone at night.”

She gapes at him for a second, because he _can’t_ , he cannot be saying what she thinks he’s saying. She looks to Friedrich, who glances up from his breakfast with an apologetic expression. Her head’s reeling, but she tightens her fingers around the strap of her bag.

“I can take care of myself,” she says, turning to go out the door again.

“I know,” he says, pulling her back inside again. Her nails bite into her palms.

“Then let me go.”

“No more Ballet School,” he says, firmer. He’s always been a man of very few words, a fact she appreciates most days.

“I’ve _just_ made first soloist,” she says. “I haven’t even gotten to dance a part yet. You can’t ask me to do this. Not now.” Not after everything, the blood and sweat and sleepless nights.

“I’m not asking.”

Her frustration explodes from her all at once. She yells, throwing her bag at him, and shoves Friedrich into the kitchen table as she storms back to her cupboard of a room. Even though she slams the door behind her, Kirsch follows her in.

“We’ve all made sacrifices, Gaby,” he says, rubbing her back as she sobs into her pillow. “This is for the best.”

And that’s that. She isn’t a dancer any more.

Maybe he’s doing it to keep her safe – God knows he’s broken her heart in the name of safety before, will probably do it again. Maybe he’s even right, but – it was all she had. It was the only thing she’s ever _wanted_ , she built herself around it, and she can only survive having her whole identity obliterated so many times in her life.

After that, she tries to stop wanting things, since she’ll never be allowed them. She’s just a mechanic and nothing else. But she’s a damn good mechanic at that.

* * *

She has a friend, Johann, who works in a flower shop down the street. He’s only four years older than her, but he remembers the wartime years much better and more bitterly than she does. They don’t _talk_ about those days much – nobody really does. She’s pried some stories from his parents, who both survived the war (when she’d told them she’d been an orphan for as long as she could remember – mostly true by this point in her life – they’d been so plainly sorry for her that it’d made her heart hurt a little bit). But of everyone she knows, Johann especially does not like to talk about the past. He’s keener on the future.

The summer of 1959 is unusually hot, and one sweltering afternoon the air conditioning unit in the flower shop gives out. Her friend makes quite the scene at the auto shop, bursting in and drumming his hands against the hood of the car she’s working on.

“Gaby!” he says when she spares him an upwards glance. “Gaby, you have to come save them all.”

“Who?” she asks, not at all alarmed because Johann is _terribly_ theatrical and this sort of thing is far from new.

“The _flowers_ ,” he insists, and even though she rolls her eyes, she glances over at her foster-father for permission to go.

“Just do it,” Herr Kirsch says with a wave of his hand. “If it’ll get him out of my garage.” She kisses him on the cheek before she leaves.

It’s thirty-six degrees and she feels like she’s dying, her hair damp underneath her scarf. She pulls it off her head and mops her forehead and neck off as they duck into the shop, and then ties her hair up again to keep it off her neck.

“I might melt,” she complains upon discovering that it’s somehow hotter inside than it was outside.

“Think how the poor plants feel,” he says, gesturing to the wilting stock with his hat, which he quickly disposes of on the counter. She sets to work on the offending appliance, and eventually Johann’s mother comes downstairs to give them cold lemonade.

“Thank you, Frau Fischer,” she says as she takes the glass, slick with condensation and delightfully chilly.

“Always so polite,” Frau Fischer says, sparing her son a sidelong glance. “You’d think this boy would learn some of those manners, after all the time he spends with you.” (The Fischers would like it _very_ much if Gaby were to become their daughter-in-law, something they haven’t been shy about telling her in the past. Johann, for his part, seems content just to bother her at the auto shop and give her daisies when there are extras. And Gaby – she doesn’t want things, but parents like the Fischers would certainly be something.)

“You know he hasn’t thanked me once for coming over here,” she says. Johann makes a wounded noise from where he sits on the counter.

“Tsk,” his mother scolds. “You haven’t thanked her? She’s our hero today.”

“Oh no,” Gaby says, laughing off the praise.

“Come up and have supper with us once you’re done,” Frau Fischer says before disappearing back up the stairs.

“ _Thanks_ ,” Johann sighs forlornly. “I won’t hear the end of that for weeks.”

“You deserve it,” she says, setting back to work on the air conditioner. They fall into a comfortable silence for some time after that, the only sounds the metal clanking of her tools as she works.

Eventually, he breaks the silence with one of his usual contemplative remarks. He’s always philosophizing about something, constantly trapped in his own head, but this time he catches her off-guard. “I’m thinking about leaving Berlin,” he says.

“The heat will break,” she says, because she doesn’t know how to respond to that seriously.

“It’s not the heat,” he says, and she bites her tongue. “Things are getting bad here, Gaby. They’re going to get worse before they get better.”

“Where would you go?” she asks, twisting her wrench more forcefully than she needs to. Something clanks into place deep in the machinery, and she hopes vaguely that she hasn’t done any more damage.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Vienna. Or Paris.”

She scoffs.

“What?” he asks. “It’d be better there.”

“Of _course_ it’d be _better_ there,” she says. That’s not what she was protesting. She sighs, pressing the glass of lemonade to her cheek. It might just be the heat, but she feels like the edges of her vision are greying out.

“Then why…” He mimics her scoff.

“Because, how would you get there? What would you do there if you did make it? Would you take your parents? Your sisters? You have no family outside the city, no passports, no money. And this shop isn’t worth one train ticket, let alone five.”

“It’d be worth it,” he insists. “To get out of this city.”

“It’s a dream, Johann,” she snaps. “It’s not even a very good one.”

Just at that moment the machine kicks on again, spitting out a few experimental bursts of foul-smelling tepid air before a steadier stream of coolness begins.

“Fixed,” Gaby says, and she can’t help but be a little proud of herself, because she doesn’t know all that much about air conditioning machines but she’s _good_.

 “You really are a hero,” he says quietly, preening one of the drooping plants like it’s a prize showdog and not a fern, or whatever it is.

“What are you going to do for business?” she asks, because the stock is all looking the worse for wear and not really salable.

“Hope nobody has an anniversary, I suppose,” he says. For a moment she considers apologizing to him, but she worries he might take it as some kind of tacit approval of his ridiculous plans. Instead, she wipes her hands off on her scarf, glancing towards the stairs to the Fischers’ apartment.

“I think your mother promised me supper,” she says. Johann smiles and ushers her in, and she supposes that she’s forgiven anyway.

* * *

Herr Kirsch dies the next year of a heart attack, leaving Gaby orphaned twiceover. Johann, who never did manage to get to Paris, goes to the funeral with her. His parents send a large bouquet of very nice roses along with their condolences, and they even offer to let her move in with them. But she decides to stay in Herr Kirsch’s old apartment; she spends enough time at the auto shop that all she really needs is somewhere to leave her things and sleep at night.

The auto shop boys flounder without Herr Kirsch around. He might not have adopted all of them, but he did teach most of them everything they know, and his absence is sorely felt.

“Kirsch kept all the books,” Friedrich says to her one evening before she leaves for the night. “I don’t have any idea what I’m doing.”

She stays three hours longer to pour over the ledgers with him. Together they determine that they’re hurting very badly for money, but she doesn’t have any idea what to do about it. She sends him back to his wife and family, and stays another forty-five minutes stewing over the figures alone. When she goes back to the apartment that night, it is empty and cold and completely devoid of color except for the bright, bright red of the roses.

She doesn’t sleep a wink.

The next day they gather everyone in the garage. She expects pushback to the bad news, maybe violence – Herr Kirsch had been one for charity cases, as evidenced by Gaby herself, and the boys that work in the shop are a ragtag crew of bad-tempered and troubled men.

However, the first response to the news is a low whispered discussion between a few of the older men. Someone – one of the brothers Gaby always mixes up, Kurt or Paul, raises his hand with a suggestion.

“We know someone who might be able to bring us some… extra work,” he says, lifting his eyebrows as if to indicate the illicit nature of this work.

“Kirsch didn’t want us taking those kinds of jobs,” Friedrich reminds him. He’d been a man of some integrity, and keeping Gaby and the rest of his staff out of the eyes of the police had been high on his list of priorities.

“He’s dead,” the other brother says.

For some reason, Friedrich turns to her to make the decision. Her mouth feels dry, because her foster-father hadn’t been _wrong_ about how dangerous being caught at criminal activity could be. But hunger will kill them just as surely as police will.

They take the work.

* * *

That year wears on slowly and is hard on her health. Every month that passes she sleeps less and less, and by August she’s only getting a few hours a night if she’s lucky.

When Johann shakes her awake that morning at the crack of dawn, she’s so tired she thinks she might be dreaming him.

“You have to come,” he says, practically dragging her out of her bed. She’s alarmed by his voice as he pleads with her – this isn’t some flight of fancy of his, he’s genuinely panicked. Terrified, even. He only gives her enough time to pull on her shoes and put a coat on over her pajamas before he ushers her out the door.

“Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?” she asks, but he just shakes his head and glances back over his shoulder, clearly unsettled.

He takes her to the flower shop, where he hushes her as they go in because the rest of his family is still asleep. They go up to the roof, and from there they can see the border – and she can feel the bottom drop out of her stomach when she sees what is happening there.

The place is downright teaming with troops, rolling out barbed wire, ripping up the streets, forming human blockades.

“What are they doing?” Gaby asks, sinking down lower on the roof as if they might spot her hiding up here.

“Closing the border,” Johann says. “I heard they’re going to build a wall.”

Even looking at the hellscape before her, even with as bad as things have been – in that moment, she still doesn’t believe it will happen.

* * *

It does happen, and it happens quickly.

Somehow, her life goes on. She still has work to do, although the looming presence of the troops and the Wall less than a kilometer away make their illegal activities all the more perilous. She and Friedrich do what they can to keep everyone fed.

Only a few months later, in the dead of winter, the Fischers disappear. It happens overnight; one day they’re there, the next gone. Their shop isn’t even closed up properly and most of their things are still in their apartment. Gaby hopes, blindly, that Johann just found some way to get them out. While Friedrich helps her board the flower shop up, she imagines the Fischers in a Parisian café, drinking coffee and laughing.

She knows that’s not what happened. She wishes she hadn’t talked him out of it, those short few years ago. Maybe if she hadn’t, she’d be in Paris with them. She should’ve gone. She should’ve left the day she turned eighteen, but fear had kept her here, in this rotting city she was born in, so she didn’t, and maybe that’s her own stupid fault.

Things are harder, with Johann gone.

* * *

Disappearances become more common. They lose a handful of mechanics. Friedrich’s wife loses her sister. Across town, an entire garage is shut down, sending a slew of legitimate work their way, but it’s a bittersweet thing. Hardly anyone gets any answers, but they’ve come not to expect them in the first place and quickly they all learn to bite their tongues.

She’s walking home alone at night one evening when a car peels up to her in the alleyway and someone pulls her inside before she even has a chance to break into a run. _That’s it_ , she thinks as her fingers slip off the frame of the car and the door slams shut behind her. _That’s it. I’m gone._

Tomorrow, she won’t turn up for work. Friedrich will find her car still in the garage, her apartment untouched, and he’ll sigh and shake his head and try to move on with his life before he disappears too.

Another car door slams, the tires screech on the pavement outside, and the momentum of the turn throws her back into the door. She tries to grab the handle, hoping to free herself even if it means tumbling out onto the street at speed, but someone grabs her wrist.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” says a cool female voice – British. Gaby looks over at the other woman in the car and jerks her arm away from her grasp. Quickly, she surveys her surroundings.

There are three other people in the car; the two men in the front seat are taciturn and silent. The woman who pulled her into the car is all cool diffidence, legs crossed primly, hair wrapped in the kind of scarf you don’t use to wipe motor oil off your hands. Between them is a large leather bag that the woman rests her hand on.

Gaby can’t think of anything else to do, so she lunges at the driver across the space of the car, very nearly making contact before the woman intercepts her. “Miss Teller, please,” the woman pleads, and the sound of her real name on someone else’s tongue freezes her blood in her veins. She’s worse than gone. Worse than _dead_. She’s got to get out of here.

“Who are you?” she asks, looking around the car for any possible escape.

“My name’s Camille Lloyd-Hunter,” she says, folding her hands on her lap. “I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. We’re going to take you somewhere safe.”

“My apartment’s safe,” she protests.

“Is it?” Camille asks with a drawn smile.

Gaby clenches her jaw so hard that she’s afraid her teeth are going to crack.

“We just want to talk,” Camille insists.

“Are you giving me a choice?” Gaby asks.

“I suppose not,” Camille admits, smoothing her scarf down as the car pulls into a building. Garage doors are closed behind them and the men get out of the car, leaving them alone for a moment. Gaby says nothing; Camille just watches her with a bright attention in her eyes.

“We’re clear,” one of the men ducks his head into the car to say.

“Excellent,” Camille says. She reaches into the bag and produces a set of unwieldy headphones. “I’m here on behalf of a man called Waverly, who’s in British Naval Intelligence,” she says. “He wanted to talk to you but I’m afraid it’s gotten rather difficult to travel to this part of town.” She offers Gaby the headphones. “Communications can be a little touch-and-go as well, but he’s recorded a message for you.”

Gaby takes the headset and the metal is cool under her shaking fingers. She puts it on and Camille pulls a switch somewhere. Static bursts into life in her ears.

“Hello, Miss Teller,” a man’s voice says on the recording, sounding tinny and distant. He says it with the inflection of a question, and even though she knows it’s a recording his tone is conversational enough that she wants to respond. “Terribly sorry to bother you like this, but…”

He tells her that her father has gone missing ( _old news_ , she wants to say) and that knowledge of his whereabouts will quickly become very sought-after when this knowledge goes public. That’ll make her the target of some very bad people, he says. There are things we can do to help you and things you can do to help us, he says.

There’s more but that’s the upshot of it all. They want to recruit her, and she takes the opportunity – not least of all because she’s sure they’ll kill her if she doesn’t.

After it’s all over they leave her alone in her apartment, her head full of instructions and fears.

It’s another night spent wide awake.

* * *

When she goes back to the auto shop the next day, she is so much more than just a mechanic. She’s a spy, a traitor, a Teller. That all weighs a lot, and she worries they can see it in the way she carries herself and she'll blow her cover before the mission even begins.

But all that happens is this:

“All right, Gaby?” Friedrich asks.

“Didn’t sleep,” she replies (she’s been lying all her life and she knows the easiest ones to tell are the ones that are true).

He just smiles and goes back to work and his life goes on like it always has, even though her life has been, yet again, irreparably changed.

Still, she fixes cars. She reads when she gets the chance. She sleeps uneasily at night, woken by the faintest noise at her bedroom door. She waits for someone to come for her.

And when the American waltzes right up to her, broad and brassy and anything but subtle about what he is, she’s ready for him.


End file.
